Are we living in the same world?

> To debunk it, look around you at all the major players in tech who are hoarding cash like there is no tomorrow while doing incremental improvements to products rather than building something interesting.

Putting billions of dollars into VR/AR? Facebook acquired Oculus for >2 billion, and the project had mixed success, and Facebook is still investing more but into AR instead. Microsoft has had two versions of their AR product that are bulky and expensive, and with few users. But the 2nd generation of hardware much improved over the 1st. Apple is rumored to be developing AR glasses as well.

How about self driving cars? Google is the only company with actual driverless cars on the roads. Many startups made big promises but so far have nothing publicly available. Other large companies like Ford had previously announced their intent to develop autonomous cars, but backed out, saying the challenge is too hard. This shows that a truly large company is needed to develop autonomous cars, because billions of dollars are required for a project that carries high risk.

> Once they’re big enough, innovation is close to impossible, and the self-preservation instinct kicks in. Again, you can see that in almost all BigTech players today.

What about Amazon? Nothing could be further from the truth. They keep expanding into entirely new markets. In AWS, IoT, multiple retail stores, online video, healthcare, and probably other industries I'm forgetting.

And what about Google Stadia and Xbox game streaming? Or Facebook Libra? Or all of Google's NLP research? Project Loon? Fuchsia? Go? These are fundamentally new r&d projects.

> Your phone manufacturer doesn’t care about invention as much as they care about you buying the next, slightly better model.

Gestures broadly at 2G, 3G, 4G, LTE, and 5G Phase 1. Constantly improving display technology like OLED and transparent displays and improved cameras.

The things you are describing are not even close to being the revenue drivers or “reasons for existence” for the companies you listed. As someone who worked at FB, there is nowhere CLOSE to the amount of funding that Oculus gets compared to other parts of the company. I would venture to say the same about MS - Hololens is nothing more than an experiment, that is not the funnel in which Microsoft is pouring its revenue from other parts of the business. I am not arguing that companies don’t innovate. I am, however, arguing that companies, once reached a certain size, are less and less incentivized to do so.

> I am, however, arguing that companies, once reached a certain size, are less and less incentivized to do so.

Well, I am not sure I agree with that. Large companies can afford to take the risks. For medium-sized companies the same effort is much higher chance of going out of business. e.g. If a smaller company like Sonos announced development of an AR product I think that would be really surprising.

Sorry, where are you getting these views from? Every tech company I've worked at, or have talked to people who work at them, become incredibly risk averse to innovation as they grow.

The only time they makes serious investments in innovation is when they buyout smaller companies that pose a risk to their business, or who have innovated and proven that their innovation might actually be useful. And the reason for those investments is more to protect their business rather than to foster innovation itself.

Clayton Christensen covered that in Innovators Dilemma. Large companies, on average, are very risk-averse.

Magic Leap comes to mind.

Magic Leap is a startup, I mean established mid-sized companies. The ones that are making money and steadily growing. For them taking a big risk can end the company. A startup is already expecting that they'll go out of business, and funding a startup is a big risk in general.

What I can see, literally, by looking around is that my phone is made by Huawei, my TV by Samsung, my medicine is made by a large pharmaceutical company, the train I take to work and the rail network are built by a state owned company, the web framework I used yesterday is made by a colossal tech giant, so is the text editor I use (granted that one may vary), and the cloud infrastructure my software runs on. So are the cars on the sideways looking out of the window. All big firms.

Large firms are quite literally who built all the complicated stuff at huge scale that pretty much everyone relies on all the time. I actually have to search around before I find something that was made by a small business.

And that's not because of some conspiracy, it's because they happen to make the best stuff cheap, which is a consequence of their scale. It's not a myth, you can literally confirm that by I suppose checking who makes the stuff you voluntarily buy each day.

A few large firms competing with each other is very different from a monopoly. Some of the things you mentioned have reasonable competition (phones, TVs, cars) and some are deeply steeped in anti-competitive practices (medicine, public transit).

Your argument was used to make Boeing into a monopoly and look how that turned out. It's easy to cherry-pick examples for either side, but I'd say take a step back and look at the trends and which way the evidence favors. At the end of the day it all comes down to incentives - and what incentive does a monopoly have to compete?

> few large firms competing with each other is very different from a monopoly.

very true but that's what we've been talking about in the comment chain, there's no actual global monopoly or one static entity, hence the explicit reference to Schumpeter's 'monopolistic competition'.

There is still competition between large firms, but the dynamism is temporal, few firms for years or decades seize outsized marketshare to dominate and innovate sectors before being replaced by other substantial firms, rather than a sort of bazaar economy of small firms competing at the same time. It's myspace being superceded by facebook maybe being eaten by tiktok that's going to drive technological innovation in social media, not mastodon instances.

Of course it's easy to cherry-pick, but you don't need to cherry pick. You can look at the economic development in mature economies vs developing economies. This tendency towards consolidation and innovation occurs in every single one. That's why South Korea and Japan have more large firms and are more productive than most of their Asian peers, it's why China with its economic model has outgrown India, where the same process is occuring now (see Jio).

None of those things were “invented” or truly brought to the edge of technological abilities by the companies you described. They piggyback off of existing invention, and pretty much are interested in keeping things as-is.

Your phone manufacturer doesn’t care about invention as much as they care about you buying the next, slightly better model.

Your TV manufacturer is interested in recouping the losses they have on selling you a cheap device by pushing as much advertising as possible.

The pharma company is interested in gouging as much money as they can through holding patents - they don’t develop medicine out of the goodness of their hearts.

You get the point.

> None of those things were “invented” or truly brought to the edge of technological abilities by the companies you described.

Actually, the large conglomerates do have R&D labs working on semiconductors, chemistry, manufacturing, and so on, so that they can come up with improvements to sell.

The reason why semiconductors get smaller, TVs get brighter colors, larger panels have acceptable manufacturing yields, is exactly because of this R&D.

And that is why the only innovation large corporations create is through acquisitions of smaller companies, which still have a creative spirit. Then they just consume the specifically desired parts of the acquisition and discard the rest.